How To Make Cutting-Edge Technology Hardware Really Cheap

Taking green technology beyond labs into vast deserts and fields can rack up some significant hardware costs. So significant that the success of the project often depends on a company's ability to drive the costs down.

IdeaLab CEO Bill Gross, whose eSolar solar farm has about 24,000 moving mirrors that track the sun to collect energy, has come up with a rule of thumb about ordering hardware parts for his projects.

It is all about size – from quantity of the order to measurements of the parts. Specifically, it's about mass-producing everything and making it all fit in a shipping container. And then it's about making installation so easy that a caveman could do it.